by Mary Gentle
gleamed dully in the sunlight. ‘Like I said, I’m the next-to-eldest in my
family. I used to have to look after the young ones a lot, before the priest
took me off to teach me my letters.’
Anger stung me. I have not paid enough attention to this before – or, I
have, but the necessity of having more than one set of hands to look after
Onorata made me wilfully ignore it. ‘How long do you think I’m going to
have an assassin near my baby?’
Ramiro Carrasco de Luis blushed like the schoolboy he would have
been when his local priest singled him out as worth teaching his letters.
‘You can kill me. Torture me.’ He looked down at his dirty bare feet.
‘Without needing to think whether anyone will ask why. They won’t.
Under these circumstances, do you think I’d take a step out of line?’
I thought him a long way from the sharply-dressed secretary who’d
waited on Aldra Federico and Sunilda. The sun had bleached his
doublet, and the foot-less Frankish hose. He went bare-headed as slaves
do, his hair growing out short and shaggy. The labour the captain had
also co-opted him into on the Sekhmet had hardened his muscles, as well
as his palms and the soles of his feet.
I waited until he looked up, rubbing my thumb in small circles on
Onorata’s chest since she seemed to like the rhythm. ‘I’ve known slaves
who decided they had nothing to lose. Who felt it didn’t matter if they
were tortured to death, so long as they had that one strike back at the master they hated. You might wait your moment, and drop my baby
over the side of the ship. Or just pinch her nostrils together. After all, it
isn’t a season yet since you tried to kill me.’
Shame made me hot even as I spoke.
This is gratuitous cruelty. Since I am ashamed of having not been sufficient for my child. Ashamed of trusting Carrasco out of sheer
convenience.
Onorata stirred, whimpered at tension she must feel through my arms
and chest. She reached out with one wavering starfish-hand.
With the automatic reaction that meant this must have happened a
hundred times before, Ramiro Carrasco absently reached down and put
his forefinger close to the baby now cradled in another’s arms.
Onorata’s hand closed around his finger, lifted her head a little as she
pulled it to her mouth, and lay back mumbling his nail as she subsided
into dreamless squirming.
‘She’s advanced,’ Ramiro murmured absently, ‘for three months. She
holds her head up well—’
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He glanced up.
Tethered by the infant’s grip, wide-eyed, the Iberian assassin gave me
a look of slave’s terror.
‘I didn’t mean anything . . . Mistress!’ Carrasco added rapidly. His
gaze skidded up and down me, like a water-insect on a canal. ‘Master!’
He grew used enough to seeing me in gowns in Venice to think of me
as female. The eastern robe and kilt, which is male clothing in
Alexandria, is enough like Frankish women’s gowns to confuse him
further. His eyes widened enough to show white at top and bottom.
I frowned, in sudden realisation. ‘Have the ship’s other slaves been
telling you stories?’
He nodded.
That will go a long way to explain why he looks more ready to soil himself than Onorata does.
‘It’s not all lies,’ I said. ‘But Alexandrine slavery’s different. I’ve been
trying to follow Rekhmire’’s model. It was the one I preferred to live
under when he bought me.’
Ramiro Carrasco de Luis looked as thoroughly miserable as I have
ever seen a man.
‘You’re right.’ He managed to achieve looking me directly in the eye.
‘Nothing honest can pass between a slave and a master. Anything I say,
you’ll think I’m ingratiating myself through fear of punishment. I
wouldn’t harm a child—’
Anger momentarily broke through, to be succeeded by despair.
‘—but you’ll think I say that for the same reason.’
I knew the secretary-assassin had not had particularly comfortable
treatment in Venice; Honorius’s men, who would have treated a slave
with some decency, set out to make the life of the man who had
threatened their commander’s family a complete and total misery. The
smallest things do it. A kick here, a spit in one’s dish there; an accidental
knock into a canal, after telling tales of monster- or plague-infested
waters. They might have done worse if Honorius had not had a quiet
word with them. The old skills of slavehood led me to be in a place to overhear my father order that they should not maim or bugger or kill the
man.
But that was all he ordered.
I studied the peeling red and callused finger that Onorata firmly
gripped. No great wonder if the university-taught lawyer had sunk into
himself; kept himself to menial duties with his eyes always cast down.
But . . .
‘I saw you with Federico and Sunilda.’ I spoke quietly enough that I
wouldn’t wake the baby. ‘I’d say you were an expert at ingratiating
yourself with people.’
The frustration and despair on Ramiro Carrasco’s face was something
I couldn’t sketch with my arms full of Onorata, and that was a shame.
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How have I become so vindictive? I wondered.
Am I so jealous, if my child appears to love him better than she does
me?
I wanted to claw at my chest through the thin linen; claw at the small
breasts that – ache as they might – would give not even one drop of milk.
‘If I trusted you, I’d be a fool,’ I said.
‘So you would,’ a powerful tenor voice interrupted.
I looked up to see Rekhmire’ looming over Ramiro Carrasco. The
Egyptian nodded to me. His gaze went to the finger that Onorata suckled
on.
‘Get the rest of the baggage ready for disembarking,’ Rekhmire’
added.
The secretary-assassin removed his hand from Onorata with a
gentleness that did speak of younger brothers and sisters. He instantly
slid off through the crowd of sailors and soldiers without another word.
If he had his shirt and tunic off, I wondered, how many weals would I
see on his back?
‘You can’t trust that man.’ Rekhmire’ gazed, not at me, but at the
massive masonry walls of Constantinople harbour gliding past. They
dwarfed the other ships anchored here in the Golden Horn.
His expression would have seemed impassive to someone who didn’t
know him well.
Oddly enough, his overt bad temper reassured me. ‘You got out of the
bunk the wrong side this morning . . . ’
Rekhmire’ suddenly smiled at me. ‘It’s always a little nerve racking to
see one’s superiors again. Who knows what I’ve failed to report back in
the last half year or so?’
The idea of the large Egyptian being dressed down by his spymasters
here in Constantinople . . . I smiled. ‘I’d like to hear that conversation.’
A sudden change came in the tone of talk around us. Rekhmire’
frowned. I glanced around. Attila and half the ship’s crew were looking
over the port side of the boat—<
br />
No, every man looks in that direction.
Clasping Onorata, I elbowed my way back to Tottola’s side at the rail,
the book-buyer in his familiar place beside me.
Ships lined the quays at the foot of Constantinople’s massive walls.
The larger vessels anchored further out in the harbour. More of them
moored here than there had been ships in Venice. Every kind of ship:
cogs, dhows, bireme galleys. Warships.
At Venice, I missed the full-distance sight of the Sekhmet moored in St
Mark’s basin. At Alexandria, now – I found it brought home to me that
the Alexandrine navy consists of more than one trireme.
‘Six,’ I counted, and took unfair advantage of Tottola’s presence to tie
Onorata’s sling firmly around his chest. I hauled prepared paper and
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silverpoint out of my linen purse, to sketch everything from the high
sterncastle of the nearest trireme to its triangular prow sail.
Yes, it came from the same dockyard as the Sekhmet. But to see the ship all at once, whole . . .
Six – no, seven – of the narrow vessels rocked on the gentle swell in the
harbour. Twenty-three paces from prow to stern, if they matched ours:
better than a hundred and twenty feet. And a mere seventeen or eighteen
feet wide. Narrow, knife-hulled vessels, with bronze nozzles pointing out
of the dragon’s mouths at their prows. Oars spidering rhythmically into
the sea . . .
Hand and eye moving between ships and paper, it took me a minute to
notice that the smaller sails were set. On most of the triremes, a crew of
oarsman was in evidence.
‘They’re not moored—’ I caught the line of one galley’s stern as she
turned away from us: a heartbreaking beautiful swell up from the water,
past the cabin ports, to the central stock of the rudder.
A few lines put in cargo cogs in the background, for the scale.
‘Do they patrol the harbour here?’
Rekhmire’ did not answer. I sketched the tracery of rope and sail
against the sky, angry that I could not – because I did not know the use
of each – draw it properly. If I had Mainz’s freedom about the ship, I
would know every function.
I hatched horizontal lines for the hull’s reflection in the harbour and
abandoned the page, turning to the next empty sheet, and the trireme
that carried the lion-head of the Pharaoh-Queen on its mainsail. ‘That’s
one big ship . . . ’
At my ear, Rekhmire’’s voice sounded oddly.
‘No – no, it’s really not . . . ’
I lifted my head from the page, and saw what he must be looking at.
‘That’s an interesting trick of perspective.’
Close at hand, a hull with a rack of masts rose up against the
background of Constantinople’s walls as if it were a mountainside. A
ship whose designation I didn’t know – not a galley, not a cargo-ship –
but which some trick of distance and light made ten times the size of
every other ship here.
Unimaginably huge . . .
I watched as one of the Alexandrine navy triremes rowed to pass far
behind the evidently foreign craft.
Attila swore. ‘ Christ Emperor! ’
I leaned out, ship’s rail hard against my belly, healed wound forgotten.
I stared into the light blazing up from the water.
Distantly I could hear the trireme’s drum beating the pace. The oars
lifted, dipped, flashed drops of sea water—
And the trireme did not slide out of sight behind the close-at-hand
ship.
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It glided between us and it.
Not something that is small, close at hand, seeming large. Something
large, far off, that is vast.
‘Not a trick.’ Rekhmire’ sounded stifled. His face showed blank shock.
As the ranked oars sent the trireme curving towards the stern of the
foreign ship, I stared at the top of the trireme’s mainmast.
The very top of the mast did not reach as high as the foreign ship’s
stern deck.
I judged a man standing in the crow’s-nest of the trireme would still
find himself the height of a house below the foreign ship’s taffrail.
‘I – wait!’ I gripped Onorata almost too hard, finding myself with both
arms wrapped protectively about her sling. ‘I remember—’
Memory came back with instant clarity. Cannon-metal grey skies.
Storm-lightning and rain shining all but purple on the heaving Adriatic
swell. And seen from the deck of the Iskander . . .
‘I’ve seen this before!’
Beating up against storm after storm in the Adriatic. And the sailors
telling hushed rumours of . . .
‘Ghost ships.’ I breathed out. ‘That’s . . . ’
‘Not a ghost,’ Rekhmire’ completed, his hand coming down warm on
my shoulder.
‘But it is a ship.’
My eyes no longer lied to me. The ghost ship was moored far out from
the quays, almost in the centre of the harbour. Each of the Alexandrine
navy galleys patrolled around it: around the great walls of wood that rose
from the water. A blue-glass shadow echoed it, as deep again.
Now I saw it again as it was – and how I had seen it at sea. That vast
assembly of bare wood, ranked stark as a winter forest against the sky,
would hold lateen sails. Sails piled higher and higher, one row on top of
another, each bellied out in a tight curve against the wind. I had seen
rank upon rank of them, rising up against the storm.
In this clear morning light of Constantinople’s harbour, each spar
showed the irregular edges that meant sails bundled and furled.
Below the masts was a great broad hull, with a flat prow. A hull that
my eyes told me stood ten times longer, and five times higher, than any
other ship in the harbour. The deck swarmed with men so tiny at this
distance that I must believe the size of their ship.
As we inched past the ghost ship, I saw painted on the prow, in green
and gold and red paint, a great spiked serpentine beast. Eyes were flat
black-on-white discs, staring out across the Alexandrine waters and at us.
With shaking fingers, I made notes too rough to be of use. But copying
the drawing of the serpent told me one thing.
Not in Iberia. Not in Carthage. Nor Rome. Nor Venice.
‘Not the Turks, either,’ I found myself murmuring aloud, thinking of
the patterns woven into Baris¸’s tunic. ‘I’ve seen much while searching
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out the New Art. That – that is nothing like any style of painting I’ve ever
seen.’
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9
Identical shock showed on each face. Honorius’s two men-at-arms, the
ship’s sailors, Asru, Carrasco, Johannes Gutenberg. Rekhmire’.
Attila snorted out a protest. ‘They don’t build ships that big!’
Rekhmire’ frowned and muttered words which I finally distinguished
as a list of shipyards. ‘Cyprus, Sidon, Tyre, Venice, Carthage, La
Rochelle . . . ’
He glanced up at the trireme’s captain, on the sterncastle. I could see
the man shaking his head.
‘No. None of them.’ Rekhmire’ narrowed his eyes against the sun
glittering off the water.
‘Menmet-Ra said nothing of this. It must have
arrived recently, therefore. Within the last few weeks.’
‘Arrived here? You’re likely right—’ Onorata whined and mumbled. I
stroked her cheek, hypnotised by the sight of the immense ship. ‘—but I
think it’s been in the Middle Sea longer than that.’
My drawing had gone, destroyed by weather, but I could recognise
what I had taken for delirium and trompe l’oeil, in the Adriatic sea.
Rekhmire’ tilted his head back. At this distance it was possible to pick
out small figures of men on that impossibly high rail. Not possible to see
any detail. He mused aloud, ‘It will be – interesting – to know how it
came to be here.’
‘And if anybody can find out, you can!’
He gave me the same abrupt and undignified grin that he had
sometimes gifted me with in Carthage.
It stayed quiet enough that I could hear ropes creaking overhead, and
the sweeps groaning as the oars brought us steadily on towards our
mooring place. The captain bellowed something obscene as our wake
wavered, the rowers’ attention being all on the huge ship. I realised we
were listing, every man who could lining the rail on this side of the ship.
I shaded my eyes with my free hand. ‘How many men would it take to
crew something that size?’
‘It’s . . . remarkable.’ Lines creased Rekhmire’’s forehead; I could see
them where his hand lifted his cloth veil as he tried to cut out the ambient
light from sky and flashing wavelets. He looked back at me. ‘But, if I may
say so – not our first concern. We have matters to take up with the
Pharaoh-Queen. Although it might be useful, perhaps, to mention to her
that you’ve seen this vessel months ago.’
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Our ship drove on steadily towards the mountainous masonry of
Constantinople. I realised I had the jumping frogs in my belly again.
The ghost ship. Yes. But . . .
Sooner or later, the Pharaoh-Queen will call me in to bear witness to
what I saw in Rome.
When this city had been built by the Romans and Carthaginians, it
was called Byzantium. The Franks called it ‘Constantinople’ after one of
their emperors, and added monumental grandeur to the place. But it was
the last of dynastic Egypt that had taken the city and changed it to New
Alexandria, long centuries in the past, after the Turks overran the